UPDATE: Due to forecasted bad weather, Bayou Fest is rescheduled to June 6.
Sankofa Wetland Park is an oasis of nature and nature-focused activities in the Lower Ninth Ward. Every week, people go there to fish, birdwatch, jog or just enjoy the benches and grassy areas along the water.
The annual Bayou Fest is a free celebration of the park, with live music, games, free crawfish and more. The festival’s 6th edition is 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, May 9, and besides the festivities, there will be a preview of the next phase of development, including construction of an outdoor amphitheater.
“We’re trying to support this area, making it a real destination space for nature-based recreation,” says Rashida Ferdinand, founder and director of Sankofa Community Development Corporation. “This is home. This is what’s in our backyard. There’s space for multiple uses. Having outdoor events and outdoor experiences is part of our culture in New Orleans.”
The festival highlights many of the regular activities offered by the space, including kayaking, birdwatching, horseback riding and fishing, and there will be free fishing lessons. There also are lawn games including Jumbo Jenga, STEM and kids’ activities and a crawfish race.
Entertainment includes the Michael Foster Project brass band and storytellers.
The festival will have free boiled crawfish while supplies last and food vendors include Mo Fries, The Food Lab, Danielle’s New Orleans Style Snoballs and food from Sankofa Market.
The Wetland Park is part of a cooperative endeavor between Sankofa and the city. It’s a 40-acre space with a large retention pond in the center. The developing park borders the Bayou Bienvenue Wetland Triangle. A linear strip of the park runs along Florida Avenue, bordering the Lower 9th Ward neighborhood around Fats Domino Avenue.
Ferdinand lived nearby while growing up.
“I grew up closer to (what is now) the park on Flood Street,” she says. “When I was growing up, it was a flat green space. Kids played softball and baseball, and there was a playground.”
The area had been used by the community for generations.
“My father grew up about three blocks away from the park,” she says. “He actually did go out there as a child.”
But by the time of Hurricane Katrina and the federal levee failures, it had become blighted. The neighborhood was then devastated by storm flooding from breaches at the nearby Industrial Canal. That did further damage to the park area as well.
Work on reclaiming the park space did not immediately follow the storm. Sankofa was formed in 2008 to create a farmers market in a neighborhood lacking grocery stores and rebuilding slowly. It worked to revitalize the area and has expanded its mission to attract development.
Sankofa entered its agreement with the city in 2014 and broke ground on the Wetland Park in 2017. The initial goal was to restore it to what had previously existed in the space. Work included removing garbage that had been dumped there, like tires, but also getting rid of invasive species of plants and trees.
Sankofa has rebuilt the area for recreational use. There are 1.5 miles of nature trails, and the group hopes to unveil wooden boardwalk extensions of the trails in marshy areas during the festival.
The park has become a popular birding spot inside the city. More than 80 species have been spotted in the park, from egrets, spoonbills and ibis to pelicans and bald eagles.
There are organized activities in the park on the second Saturday of every month. That includes fishing lessons, kayaking, lawn games and more. Running clubs use the space as well. The park is regularly open from dawn to dusk.
At Bayou Fest, Sankofa will share details on plans for an amphitheater. Following Katrina, Ferdinand saw the outdoor performance of “Waiting for Godot” performed at a devastated area near a levee breach. She kept that in mind as a possibility for redeveloping the neighborhood.
“This is the best way to have a space that is integrated with nature,” she says. “It’s part of being in your neighborhood, and you can have places to sit and hang out, but also a place for music. Like, what if we had the philharmonic here, or the Roots of Music, or a drum circle like in Congo Square?”
The amphitheater is expected to be one to two acres, about the size of a city block. It’ll be natural, landscaped space for entertainment and events. Its exact location has not been determined and Sankofa is looking for community input.
Over the last two decades, Sankofa has added more community development projects. It has a garden on Tennessee Street that grows vegetables like okra and field peas and hibiscus and there’s a chicken coop and an apiary. Another garden at St. Claude Court grows herbs sold at the Sankofa Farmers Market and used for juices it sells. In 2024, the organization opened the Sankofa Fresh Start Market, a grocery store culminating the work of the farmers market and a previous open-air market. Next, Sankofa is looking at building a headquarters for all of its initiatives.
For more information, visit sankofanola.org.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.nola.com ’
